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Thursday, September 9, 2010

Candy Claws - Hidden Lands

The float of Hidden Lands is quite substantial. The Candy Claws boys and girls are sending off their notes all strung up with balloons. I think they’ve got a few hummingbirds up there as well, tied at the ankles and fluttering hard and slow towards the sun. Sunny, bleary music, indeed. Blue skies and heat waves, large marshmallow clouds. It’s a doubly-thick, super-layered affair on all sides, with large slices of reverb-laden electronics and guitars spinning and floating all about. Each song is a bubbly airship peppering the sky, puttering lazily from one end of the horizon to the other. It’s colorful dream-pop, mega sugary, unpretentious, wide-eyed and kind, childlike, guzzling sodas and raspberry lemonades and whatnot. It’s a Saturday. A Sunday even. A member of the Forest Gospel troupe review a Candy Claws album last year, but, regrettably, I never got around to hearing it. I don’t know how this compares, but I do know that all on its own, Hidden Lands is an uber-pleasant soft-psych trip that reminds me of the golden age of bizarre pop from the likes of The Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev. Candy Claws have certainly done a wonderful thing here in releasing this. It’s been growing on me with every listen. Successively becoming clearer and crystalline in the glint of the sun.